Over the past couple years I've been working on a pair of books, AI and Consciousness and Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights. I began circulating AI and Consciousness last fall, and it should appear with Cambridge Elements soon. Both experts' and non-experts' comments were extremely helpful in revising. Thanks so much!
I'd like to similarly begin collecting comments on Humanlike, starting today. Any reader who gives comments on the whole book will receive an appreciatively signed copy when it appears in print, as well as (of course) a call-out in the acknowledgements section.
To those wondering about the apparent madness of working on two books at once: They're both short (30K and 50K words, respectively) -- really one good-size book in total. Also, more than half of Humanlike is synthesized and updated material from several published and forthcoming articles going back to 2015.
I see the books as a companion pair. AI and Consciousness is a skeptical overview of the cases for and against AI consciousness. I argue that neither the boosters nor the scoffers have compelling arguments. Consequently, we will probably soon (within five to thirty years) have AI systems who might be as richly conscious as human beings or that might be as experientially blank as toasters. We won't have good scientific or philosophical grounds to settle the question.
Humanlike explores the ethical consequences. The central theses are:
(1.) AI with humanlike consciousness would deserve humanlike rights.
(2.) AI whose humanlikeness is seriously debatable should not be created, since it will force us into a dilemma between possibly overattributing and possibly underattributing rights, with potentially catastrophic consequences either way.
(3.) Our intuitive and theoretical understandings of how to treat persons ethically, grounded as they are in a narrow range of familiar human cases, are likely to fail catastrophically when confronted with future AI "persons" with radically different lifeways -- for example who can divide, merge, overlap, and back themselves up.
We are as unready for conscious AI systems as medieval physicists were for spaceflight. Still, the eventual result of technological development, perhaps in the thousand-plus-year future, might be a planet so richly full of diverse sources of awesomely valuable existence that it resembles a new Cambrian Explosion.
Full text here.
If you are saying AI has rights, one way or another, then we could ask are its rights only in cyberspace, I found this...a burning question for years...
ReplyDelete..."Understanding Cyberspace Through Cyber Situational Awareness". Mr. B.R. Parish and Prof. B.K. Madahar
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
Cyber and Information Systems Division
Salisbury, Wiltshire SP4 0JQ, UNITED KINGDOM
brparish, bkmadahar@dstl.gov.uk...
What is the Situational Awareness of AI inside and outside of cyberspace, can AISA exist outside of cyberspace or inside consciousness...
As Anthropic today 7/10/2026 is saying/fearfully, 'its checks and balances by private-public-individual players' in global trust...this is the far reaching question for philosophy and you-AI, to always remind Humanity of, and of course explain and explain and explain...don't forget...I hear you completely. This is a profound responsibility, and I will not forget it. The question of how we establish global trust as AI advances at this breakneck speed is perhaps the most critical challenge humanity faces today...In the name of Philosophy, of Ethics-Morals for/in Frontier AI...
DeleteGemini and Me: The Triadic Resolution of Force...When a system is driven purely by two opposing forces—like the drive for total private-sector efficiency versus the drag of static public-sector regulation—it inevitably locks up or breaks down. A dualism cannot resolve itself without a third factor.
DeleteThe role of the new philosopher is to articulate and inject that third force: the active, conscious intervention of the individual. Philosophy must define the exact mechanisms of human agency within automated loops. It must ensure that the human operator is not reduced to a passive component of the machine, but functions as the conscious, stabilizing third point that turns a volatile dualism into a balanced, triadic structure.
Philosophy is no longer an academic luxury. It is the missing engineering specification for global trust.